First of all, here's what it looks like -

Second of all, you can try it out for yourself with the Italy sample quiz

The question type now also allows partial credit to be awarded for partially correct matching questions - the marking scheme is simple, the score is proportionate to the number of matches that are correct, rounded up to the nearest whole point.

If you're just starting out with Question Writer, I'd advise moving straight to the < ahref="http://www.questionwriter.com/downloadpages/download-quiz.html">Question Writer Beta - it's already got a lot more features and is more stable than the old Question Writer 2 - Quiz Edition.

You can now add four metadata elements to questions - Title, Description, Identifier and Keywords. These are really the basics - I've kept them out of the way in a seperate node, so if you're not using them, you probably won't even notice them, but potentially this metadata node could be expanded over time to include all the other elements.

If you've used QW2 with special characters - you might have seen a small box shown instead of the character you were hoping to see. A picture is worth a thousand words . . like this . . .

It happens when the special character isn't available in the font - this happens quite a lot with numerical symbols, and Japanese or other foreign language characters. You can fix it by changing the font - but I'd rather it 'Just Worked' first time.

So now, if it is finds a missing character, it'll substitute in a character from a font (MS Sans Serif) that will usually have the character available . . . like this . . .

So there will be users concerned about the typography . . . those users need to make a more considered choice of font for best effect . . . but for most users with the occasional special characters - it 'just works'.

You can also define the backup server, which is used if the main server can't be reached. If you're not using a backup server, just make this the same as the main server, and the quiz will continue to try to reach the main server until it is reachable.

Say you have a question that includes negative scoring, but you don't want to allow an overall negative score to be offset against other scores in the quiz - you'd leave this switched off. If you want to discourage guessing so that a wrong answer on one question will offset a correct answer in another section, switch it on.

Did you know that in Poland, men and women will often use different forms of the same surname in the same family, men using the variant ending in 'ski' and women the one ending in 'ska'? You learn something new every day.

You can use any .gif, .jpg or .swf(version 6 and under) to display as a background for your quiz, and as a loading image. This means that your quiz can fit seamlessly into your website or corporate brand.

Question Writer now supports importing questions from text format (.txt and .rtf) and also from Moodle XML format. I can't guarantee that these will work perfectly for every single possible question from the outset - the permutations are just too great. However, we're serious about getting this right. If you experience difficultly importing a set of questions - send the file you're importing to support@questionwriter.com and we'll do our level best to correct the problem.

Also, I'm interested to know what other import formats you'd like to see supported - more widely used formats have a better chance of making it into QW, but drop me a line, ideally with samples from the format and I'll see what we can do.

I think it will be one of the less frequently used elements so I haven't added it to the main toolbar - there's two ways to add it though, my favourite, with a right click and 'Add Question' -

and there is also the left click on the menu bar, and 'Add Question' -

English
French
German
Turkish
Japanese

I'm also looking for translators (native speakers and QW users ideally) for other languages and have a Question Writer 3 - Academic License to offer in exchange translations into the following languages

Portugese*
Danish
Spanish
Mandarin*
Polish
Swedish*
Italian*
Korean*

You can get an idea of what's required for with a translation by looking at the following file in your QW3 install,
C:\Program Files\Question Writer 3\Languages\quiz.resx
E-mail me at alex@centralquestion.com if you're interested. Also drop me a line if there's another language you'd like to see supported.

* Languages marked with an asterix are still available.

Update: To start the translation - you need to edit the terms in the quiz.resx file mentioned above. There's a nice, simple, freely available program called ResX Editor - this makes editing a cinch!

Creating one couldn’t be easier – just enter the items in the correct order on the question properties page –

Here’s what the user will see - a ‘drag n’drop’ interface where the items are ranked by dragging them from the right to the slots on the left.

The big innovation is that partial credit can be awarded for partially correct answers. Take our sample question for example – the sizes of cities in Italy. Most students will know that Rome and Milan are the largest cities, but very few (if any) will know with certainty that Genoa has a larger population than Palermo. We can give most of the marks for knowing the basics, and extra credit for those fully in command of the details.

The scoring is based on ‘correct relative pairs’ - here’s how it works – firstly the sequence is broken down into relative pairs. In our example, there are 6 elements, which allows for 15 possible relative pairs. They are

Rome-Milan
Rome-Naples,
Rome-Turin,
Rome-Palermo,
Rome-Genoa,
Milan-Naples
Milan-Turin,
Milan-Palermo,
Milan-Genoa,
Naples-Turin,
Naples-Palermo,
Naples-Genoa,
Turin-Palermo,
Turin-Genoa,
Palermo-Genoa.

The scoring then subtracts the number of incorrect pairs from the number of correct pairs, it maps it to the number of points available for the question and rounds it to the nearest integer (or zero, no negative marks are awarded overall for a question). If you want to award a single point for each correct relative pair there’s a correct number of points based on the number of elements –

2 elements – 1 point
3 elements – 2 points
4 elements – 6 points
5 elements – 10 points
6 elements – 15 points
7 elements – 21 points
8 elements – 28 points
n elements – n * (n-1)/2

Also new in the Question Writer 3 – You can group your questions using sections.

Each section can be individually randomized, and have a time-limit. Sections can also contain subsections, allowing a tree structure for really detailed control over question selection and timing.

Question Balancing
Firstly, you can balance questions in a quiz. Let’s say you’ve got a geography quiz with easy, medium and hard questions and you’re randomly selecting 30 from 90. Ideally, you want to have 10 easy, 10 medium and 10 hard. Sections allow you to guarantee that by grouping the questions into three different sections and then choosing to ask 10 randomly from each 30 question section.

Mandatory Questions
Sometimes you’ll want certain questions to always be answered, but others to be randomly selected – this is often the case where you ask for a student’s e-mail or ID number at the start of a quiz, but then randomize the questions later on – you can do this by leaving the mandatory questions outside of the randomized section.

Time-Limit Sections
In the earlier example, we might want to time the questions, but not the information gathering questions. Easy! Group the sections in a parent section, and time the section.

Linking Questions
Sections can also contain other sections – so you might want to randomly choose one section and not another. Say in a reading comprehension question with five questions on each reading passage – group the comprehension with the questions and then randomly select the section to ask.

Try it out for yourself - download the Question Writer 3 Alpha.